If you’re at all familiar with the Linux/Unix world, it’s safe to say you’ve probably heard of vim. The mode-based editor is famed for both its power and frustrating learning curve. Unlike most editors, which default to a mode where you can type text, vim defaults to a “command mode” where you can edit text through short commands bound to single keys on the keyboard. If you want to enter “insert mode” to type text, you need to press the i key, and then the escape key to return to command mode when you’re done. The commands can even be chained together, so you can, for example, use dw to delete the word the cursor is currently over. Or move the cursor three characters to the right with 3l.

The tricky part, besides learning and remembering the various commands is picking up the habit of not staying in insertion mode. The way you’re supposed to use vim is to enter that mode only for short bursts of typing. Then you exit back to command mode. This makes it more natural to use the fast cursor movement and text operation commands.

Looking to set up a blog with Ghost? While it still has a few rough edges and missing features at the time of this writing, as it’s essentially in beta at this point (hence the “0.3” versioning), it definitely shows promise as a blogging…

Starting this week, your Twitter feed is going to look a lot different. In their infinite wisdom, the social media titan has decided that their media previews should now be expanded by default in their web interface and iOS app. (You can disable it…

Need a stylish new design for your Ghost blog? Looking for something that puts your content first, with an emphasis on reducing eye strain? Allow me to introduce my new theme (which is technically a port of the one I made for Jekyll), based…

I hope you’re not a Media Temple customer, because I have bad news. GoDaddy has just acquired the hosting company, according to the press release they put out today. SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Oct. 15, 2013) — GoDaddy, the Web’s largest platform for small businesses, has…

Want to export your Markdown posts from Jekyll to a format that can be easily imported into Ghost, now that the new blogging platform has launched? By reverse-engineering the plugin the Ghost developers made for WordPress, I put together a Jekyll plugin that generates…

Ghost is a new blogging platform that aims to do one thing and do it well: blogging. Its developers want to recapture the spirit of blogging that was present in the earlier days, when it was all about writing and publishing long-form content. A…

Maine has just joined the ever-growing list of states ineligible for the Amazon Associates affiliate program. The retail giant will shortly be terminating affiliate activity in the state, and sending out unpaid earnings to participants, in response to governor Paul LePage’s recent state tax…

For a project I’ve been working on, I wanted to to have my Sidekiq worker (which is part of an RSS crawler) discover the favicon for a web site and cache it for later display. It was fun figuring out a way to do…